philosophy at the edge of the human

Here‘s the audio for a fizzy discussion on posthumanism in the arts I participated in at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London. We talked monsters, posthuman urbanism, science fiction, the speculative/critical divide in posthumanism, whether immersive media and technological arts might help us overcome entrenched dualisms in western thought and political implications (if any) of deconstructing such binaries.

This is an abstract for a presentation that I will be giving in a roundtable discussion on posthumanism and aesthetics with Debra Benita Shaw and Stefan Sorgner at the University of East London on May 18 2015. Further details will be made available.

Posthumanism can be critical or speculative. These positions converge in opposing human-centred (anthropocentric) thinking. However, their rejection of anthropocentricism applies to different areas. Critical Posthumanism (CP) rejects the anthropocentrism of modern philosophy and intellectual life; Speculative Posthumanism (SP) opposes human-centric thinking about the long-run implications of modern technology.

CP is interested in the posthuman as a cultural and political condition. Speculative Posthumanists propose the metaphysical possibility of technologically created nonhuman agents. SP states: there could beposthumans – where posthumans would be “wide human descendants” of current humans that have become nonhuman in virtue of some process of technical alteration.

In Posthuman Life I elaborate a detailed version of SP. Specially, I describe what it is to become posthuman in terms of “the disconnection thesis” [DT] (Roden 2012; 2014, Chapter 5). DT understands “becoming posthuman” in abstract terms. Roughly, it states that an agent becomes posthuman iff. it becomes independent of the human socio-technical system as a consequence of technical change. It does not specify how this might occur or the nature of the relevant agents (e.g. whether they are immortal uploads, cyborgs, feral robots or Jupiter sized Brains).

Posthuman Life argues that the abstractness of DT is epistemologically apt because there are no posthumans and thus we are in no position to deduce constraints on their possible natures or values (I refer to this position as “anthropologically unbounded posthumanism” [AUP)). AUP has implications for the ethics of becoming posthuman that are generally neglected in the literature on transhumanism and human enhancement.

The most important of these is that there can be no a priori ethics of posthumanity. Becoming posthuman can only be substantively (as opposed to abstractly) understood by making posthumans or becoming posthuman. I argue that, given the principled impossibility of a prescriptive ethics here, we must formulate strategies for speculating on and exploring nearby “posthuman possibility space”.

In this paper, I propose that aesthetic theory and practice may be a useful political model for such technological self-fashioning because it involves styles of thought or creation that discover their constraints and values by producing them. This “production model” is, I will argue, the only one liable to serve us if, with CP/SP, we reject an anthropocentric privileging of the human. I finish by considering some examples of aesthetic practice that might provide models for the politics of making posthumans or becoming posthuman.

Eric Schwitzgebel has a typically clear-eyed, challenging post on the implications of (real) artificial intelligence for our moral systems over here at the Splintered Mind. The take home idea is that our moral systems (consequentialist, deontologistical, virtue-ethical, whatever) are adapted for creatures like us. The weird artificial agents that might result from future iterations of AI technology might be so strange that human moral systems would simply not apply to them.

Scott Bakker follows this argument through in his excellent Artificial Intelligence as Socio-Cognitive Pollution , arguing that blowback from such posthuman encounters might literally vitiate those moral systems, rendering them inapplicable even to us. As he puts it:

The question of assimulating AI to human moral cognition is misplaced. We want to think the development of artificial intelligence is a development thatraises machines to the penultimate (and perennially controversial) level of the human, when it could just as easily lower humans to the ubiquitous (and factual) level of machines.

As any reader of Posthuman Life, might expect, I think Erich and Scott are asking all the right questions here.

Some (not me) might object that our conception of a rational agent is maximally substrate neutral. It’s the idea of a creature we can only understand “voluminously” by treating it as responsive to reasons. According to some (Davidson/Brandom) this requires the agent to be social and linguistic – placing such serious constraints on “posthuman possibility space” as to render his discourse moot.
Even if we demur on this, it could be argued that the idea of a rational subject as such gives us a moral handle on any agent – no matter how grotesque or squishy. This seems true of the genus “utility monster”. We can acknowledge that UM’s have goods and that consequentialism allows us to cavil about the merits of sacrificing our welfare for them. Likewise, agents with nebulous boundaries will still be agents and, so the story goes, rational subjects whose ideas of the good can be addressed by any other rational subject.
So according to this Kantian/interpretationist line, there is a universal moral framework that can grok any conceivable agent, even if we have to settle details about specific values via radical interpretation or telepathy. And this just flows from the idea of a rational being.
I think the Kantian/interpretationist response is wrong-headed. But showing why is pretty hard. A line of attack I pursue concedes to Brandom-Davidson that that we have the craft to understand the agents we know about. But we have no non-normative understanding of the conditions something must satisfy to be an interpreting intentional system or an apt subject of interpretation (beyond commonplaces like heads not being full of sawdust).
So all we are left with is a suite of interpretative tricks whose limits of applicability are unknown. Far from being a transcendental condition on agency as such, it’s just a hack that might work for posthumans or aliens, or might not.
And if this is right, then there is no a future-proof moral framework for dealing with feral Robots, Cthulhoid Monsters or the like. Following First Contact, we would be forced to revise our frameworks in ways that we cannot possible have a handle on now. Posthuman ethics must proceed by way of experiment.
Or they might eat our brainz first.

Stopped over in Athens Airport trying to digest three days at the Posthuman Politics conference at Mytilini, Lesbos, 25-28 September. It was an intense experience on so many levels and utterly worthwhile. My work has veered into some relentlessly abstract places recently, because someone has to … But having the privilege of attending Jaime del Val’s metahuman performance and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner’s star turn on metahumanist pedagogy was formative.

I’m not done with posthumanist metaphysics, or Scott’s semantic Götterdämmerung, but Stefan and Jaime are forging a value-pluralist posthuman politics with a real chance of productively mapping human-posthuman modes of embodiment and experience within an interdisciplinary framework. For what it’s worth, I think their open-textured practice may constitute our most tenable (if still precarious) path through the posthuman predicament. It has direct implications for public policy (e.g. Stefan’s argument for genetic engineering in education) – perhaps even for getting out of the neoliberal quagmire. None of this, of course, begins to convey the energy and intellectual openness of the event or the delightful hospitality of Evi Sampanikou and the humans and nonhumans of the University of the Aegean.

Kevin has provided a typically engaging gloss on the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism over at the IEET site. I don’t fundamentally disagree with his account of transhumanism (though I think he needs to emphasize its fundamentally normative character) but the account of posthumanism he gives here has some shortcomings:

Two significant differences between transhumanism and the posthuman is the posthuman’s focus on information and systems theories (cybernetics), and the posthuman’s consequent, primary relationship to digital technology; and also the posthuman’s emphasis on systems (such as humans) as distributed entities—that is, as systems comprised of, and entangled with, other systems. Transhumanism does not emphasize either of these things.

Posthumanism derives from the posthuman because the latter represents the death of the humanist subject: the qualities that make up that subject depend on a privileged position as a special, stand-alone entity that possesses unique characteristics that make it exceptional in the universe—characteristics such as unique and superior intellect to all other creatures, or a natural right to freedoms that do not accrue similarly to other animals. If the focus is on information as the essence of all intelligent systems, and materials and bodies are merely substrates that carry the all-important information of life, then there is no meaningful difference between humans and intelligent machines—or any other kind of intelligent system, such as animals.

Now, I realize we can spin definitions to different ends; but even allowing for our different research aims, this won’t do. Posthumanists may, but need not, claim that humans are becoming more intertwined with technology. They may, but need not, claim that functions, relations or systems are more ontologically basic than intrinsic properties. Many arch-humanists are functionalists, holists or relationists (I Kant, R Brandom, D Davidson, G Hegel . . .) and one can agree that human subjectivity is constitutively technological (A Clark) without denying its distinctive moral or epistemological status. Reducing stuff to relations can be a way of emphasizing the transcendentally constitutive status of the human subject, taking anthropocentrism to the max (see below). Emphasizing the externality or contingency of relations can be a way of arguing that things are fundamentally independent of that constitutive activity (as in Harman’s OOO or DeLanda’s assemblage ontology).

So I raise Kevin’s thumbnails with a few of my own.

A philosopher is a humanist if she believes that humans are importantly distinct from non-humans and supports this distinctiveness claim with a philosophical anthropology: an account of the central features of human existence and their relations to similarly general aspects of nonhuman existence.

A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most nonhumans lack

Transhumanists claims that technological enhancement of human capacities is a desirable aim (all other things being equal). So the normative content of transhumanism is largely humanist. Transhumanists just hope to add some new ways of cultivating human values to the old unreliables of education and politics.

Posthumanists reject anthropocentrism. So philosophical realists, deconstructionists, new materialists, Cthulhu cultists and naturalists are posthumanists even if they are unlikely to crop up on one another’s Christmas lists.

Posthuman Politics, 25th until the 28th of September 2014, University of the Aegean, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, Geography Building – University Campus.

I’m presenting the same paper at both. Here’s the abstract, though the details of the argument remain to be filled in!

On Reason and Spectral Machines: an anti-normativist response to Bounded Posthumanism

David Roden, The Open University UK

In Posthuman Life I distinguish two speculative claims regarding technological successors to current humans: an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism. ABP holds:

1) There are transcendental constrains on cognition and agency that any entity qualifying as a posthuman successor under the Disconnection Thesis (Roden 2012, 2014) would have to obey.

2) These constraints are realized in the structure of human subjectivity and rationality.

One version of ABP is implied by normativist theories of intentionality for which original or “first class” intentionality is only possible for beings that can hold one another publicly to account by ascribing and adopting normative statuses (Brandom 1994). If Normativist ABP is correct, then posthumans – were they to exist – would not be so different from us for they would have to belong to discursive communities and subscribe to inter-subjective norms (See Wennemann 2013).

Normativist ABP thus imposes severe constraints on posthuman “weirdness” and limits the political implications of speculative claims about posthuman possibility such as those in my book. In this paper, I will argue that we should reject Normativist ABP because we should reject normativist theories of intentionality. For normativism to work, it must be shown that the objectivity and “bindingness” of social norms is independent of individual beliefs or endorsements. I will argue that the only way in which this can be achieved is by denying the dependence of normative statuses upon the particular dispositions, states and attitudes of individuals; thus violating plausible naturalistic constraints on normativism.

In response, I will argue for an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism for which all constraints on posthuman possibility must be discovered empirically by making posthumans or becoming posthuman. This implies a similarly unbounded posthuman politics for which there is no universal reason or transhistorical subjectivity.

Anita Mason has a contribution to the long running genre debate here at the Guardian entitled “Genre fiction radiates from a literary centre”. I think her attempt to constitute this supposed center self-deconstructs spectacularly, but in a manner that is instructive and worth teasing apart.

This metaphorical representation of the literary as the universal and indeterminate hub from which determinate “rule-governed” genres “radiate” does not cohere with her criteria of demarcation between the literary and the non-literary. On the one hand, the literary can be anything; is governed by no determinate rules. On the other, dense psychological characterization is necessary for the literary since, she argues, Brave New World, and Consider Phlebas fail the test of literariness due to their lack of this attribute.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. Despite Mason’s peremptory reading of The Drowned World, Ballard’s oeuvre is famously unconcerned with character and “plot”, such as it is, incidental to one of the most profoundly literary treatments of the condition of modernity in prose. Few modern novels present a more literary and unitary treatment of their subject than Crash, for example, where a brilliantly intricate chain of metaphors and symbols explore the contingency of desire in the face of technical change.

On these grounds we would also have to exclude postmodern fabulists and experimental writers such as Pynchon, Barthelme, Robb-Grillet and Christine Brooke-Rose. So Mason’s Ptolemaic rhetoric of centrality is just a blind for her anthropocentrism. The universe of literature, I hope, is post-Copernican and limitless.

Catherine Malabou has an intriguing piece on the vexed question of the relationship between the “humanities” and science in the journal Transeuropeenneshere.

It is dominated by a clear and subtle reading of Kant, Foucault and Derrida’s discussion of the meaning of Enlightenment and modernity. Malabou argues that the latter thinkers attempt to escape Kantian assumptions about human invariance by identifying the humanities with “plasticity itself”. The Humanities need not style themselves in terms of some invariant essence of humanity. They can be understood as a site of transformation and “deconstruction” as such. Thus for Derrida in “University Without Condition”, the task of the humanities is:

the deconstruction of « what is proper to man » or to humanism. The transgression of the transcendental implies that the very notion of limit or frontier will proceed from a contingent, that is, historical, mutable, and changing deconstruction of the frontier of the « proper ».

Where, as for Foucault, the deconstruction of the human involves exhibiting its historical conditions of possibility and experimenting with these by, for example, thinking about “our ways of being, thinking, the relation to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness “.

This analysis might suggest that the Humanities have little to fear from technological and scientific transformations of humans bodies or minds; they are just the setting in which the implications of these alterations are hammered out.

This line of thought reminds me of a revealingly bad argument produced by Andy Clark in his Natural Born Cyborgs:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game . . . We are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and work (Clark 2003, 142).

This is obviously broken-backed: that earlier bootstrapping didn’t produce posthumans doesn’t entail that future ones won’t. Even if humans are essentially self-modifying it doesn’t follow that any prospective self-modifying entity is human.

The same problem afflicts Foucault and Derrida’s attempts to hollow out a reservation for humanities scholars by identifying them with the promulgation of transgression or deconstruction. Identifying the humanities with plasticity as such throws the portals of possibility so wide that it can only refer to an abstract possibility space whose contents and topology remains closed to us. If, with Malabou, we allow that some of these transgressions will operate on the material substrate of life, then we cannot assume that its future configurations will resemble human communities or human thinkers – thinkers concerned with topics like sex, work and death for example.

Malabou concludes with the suggestion that Foucault and Derrida fail to confront a quite different problem. They do not provide a historical explanation of the possibility of transformations of life and mind to which they refer:

They both speak of historical transformations of criticism without specifying them. I think that the event that made the plastic change of plasticity possible was for a major part the discovery of a still unheard of plasticity in the middle of the XXth century, and that has become visible and obvious only recently, i.e. the plasticity of the brain that worked in a way behind continental philosophy’s back. The transformation of the transcendental into a plastic material did not come from within the Humanities. It came precisely from the outside of the Humanities, with again, the notion of neural plasticity. I am not saying that the plasticity of the human as to be reduced to a series of neural patterns, nor that the future of the humanities consists in their becoming scientific, even if neuroscience tends to overpower the fields of human sciences (let’s think of neurolinguistics, neuropsychoanalysis, neuroaesthetics, or of neurophilosophy), I only say that the Humanities had not for the moment taken into account the fact that the brain is the only organ that grows, develops and maintains itself in changing itself, in transforming constantly its own structure and shape. We may evoke on that point a book by Norman Doidge, The Brain that changes itself. Doidge shows that this changing, self-fashioning organ is compelling us to elaborate new paradigms of transformation.

I’m happy to concede that the brain is a special case of biological plasticity, but, as Eileen Joy notes elsewhere, the suggestion that the humanities have been out of touch with scientific work on the brain is unmotivated. The engagement between the humanities (or philosophy, at least) and neuroscience already includes work as diverse as Paul and Patricia Churchland’s work on neurophilosophy and Derrida’s early writings on Freud’s Scientific Project.

I’m also puzzled by the suggestion that we need to preserve a place for transcendental thinking at all here. Our posthuman predicament consists in the realization that we are alterable configurations of matter and that our powers of self-alteration are changing in ways that put the future of human thought and communal life in doubt. This is not a transcendental claim. It’s a truistic generalisation which tells us little about the cosmic fate of an ill-assorted grab bag of academic disciplines.

The Joint Annual Conference of The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy in 2014 will be hosted by the Centre for the Humanities, the Faculty of Humanities and the Descartes Institute, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

The SEP/FEP conference is the largest annual event in Europe that aims to bring together researchers, teachers and others, from different disciplines, interested in all areas of contemporary European philosophy. Submissions are therefore invited for individual papers and panel sessions in all areas of contemporary European philosophy. For 2014, submissions that address the conference’s plenary theme – Philosophy After Nature – are particularly encouraged. This would include papers and panels that are after nature in the sense of being in pursuit of nature’s consequences. We invite perspectives on critique, science, ecology, technology and subjectivity as bound up with conceptions of nature and experiment with various positions in contemporary thought.

Abstracts of 500 words for individual paper submissions and proposals for panels should be sent to Rick Dolphijn (philosophyafternature@uu.nl) by 17 May 2014. Proposals for panels should include a 500-word abstract for each paper within the panel. Proposals from academics, graduate students and independent scholars are welcome.
Conference committee: Rosi Braidotti, Bert van den Brink, Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin and Paul Ziche.